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Sunday, March 19, 2006

Law - Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?

"Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?" is the headline to a story occupying the more than a full-page of the NY Times Business section today. A few quotes from a long article that should be read in full:

Although the nation's law schools for years have been graduating classes that are almost evenly split between men and women, and although firms are absorbing new associates in numbers that largely reflect that balance, something unusual happens to most women after they begin to climb into the upper tiers of law firms. They disappear.

According to the National Association for Law Placement, a trade group that provides career counseling to lawyers and law students, only about 17 percent of the partners at major law firms nationwide were women in 2005, a figure that has risen only slightly since 1995, when about 13 percent of partners were women. * * *

"Firms want women to stay. Men at the firms want women to stay, and women want to stay. So why aren't they?" asks Karen M. Lockwood, a partner at Howrey in Washington. "Law firms are way beyond discrimination — this is about advancement and retention. Problems with advancement and retention are grounded in biases, not discrimination."

With law firms courting major corporations that demand diversity within the ranks of those advising them, and with women increasingly dominating the top tiers of law school graduates, veteran lawyers say that promoting women's legal careers is not just a matter of goodwill or high-mindedness. It's also a winning business strategy.

"Forget about skin color or gender or whatever, if you want to run a great business, you need great, talented people. And I don't care if I'm hiring Martians if it makes good business sense," says Michael M. Boone, a founding partner of Haynes and Boone in Dallas. "Even the largest firms are at risk if they don't do this." * * *

Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a 52-year-old partner in the Framingham, Mass., office of the Worcester, Mass., firm of Bowditch & Dewey, details the hurdles facing female lawyers in her recently published book "Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women's Success in the Law" (Thomson Legalworks, $25). In her book she writes that law firms need to reorganize if they want to encourage and retain women as partners, and that roadblocks — whether they be errant mentoring, opaque networking opportunities, low-grade case assignments or arbitrary male control of key management committees — should all be reviewed.

"Law firms like to talk about running the firm like a business and looking at the numbers, but they're running on an institutional model that's about 200 years old," she says. "Most law firms do a horrible job of managing their personnel, in terms of training them and communicating with them."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 19, 2006 02:31 PM
Posted to General Law Related